This compact yet detailed and abundantly illustrated book offers a perceptive exploration of architecture as the art of building, tracing roots back to ancient Greece and Rome. A practicing architect as well as a professor and theorist in architecture, Demetri Porphyrios discusses the roles of imitation, tectonics, ornament, and originality in architecture, arguing that the "classical" is that which speaks of tradition although in a modern voice. "A work is classical," he posits, "not because it is immutable, eternal, and sacred but because it continually searches for and brings out the new."